Breaking Point
by Ukaisha
Summary: Everyone has a breaking point. What matters is what breaks. (Eric centric. One shot. ConCrit plz)


A/N: In which the darker facets of Eric Cartman are briefly explored.

Please note that the character is referred to as "Eric" throughout the entirety of this short story, and that this IS a one shot; it's over and done with and will not be expanded upon.  
This story vaguely explores touchy subjects such as implied mental illness and some overtly religious undertones. Be aware of this.  
ConCrit is welcome.

And one last thing-

Happy Birthday Eric.

* * *

_Breaking Point_

Eric had a room of glass.

Mind you, it was not necessarily only full of glass. While the items were certainly all fragile, some of them were ceramic. Some of them were china. Some were clay. Porcelain.  
But, seeing as not a single one of them was immune to shattering given the proper application, all of them were glass.

He spent days and weeks and months building this room. It was a guest room, unused in a house occupied only by himself, his mother, and a lazy cat who was no trouble to anyone.

They were everything.  
Bowls, cups, plates. Statues, figurines, knickknacks.  
All neatly arranged, all carefully organized.

Eric would spent hours perfecting the glass room. In his more severe fits of blind obsession, he would forfeit sleep all night to make the room just so. There were shelves upon which he situated the statues and figures, and dressers upon which he displayed the dinnerware. There were more surfaces than any room had any right to need, and every one of them was crowded with the manifestations of breakable dreams.  
Everything had its place, even if it took Eric hours to find it.

He would acquaint himself with every object and admire their beauty with a fine eye for detail. Not a single occupant of the room dodged his thoughtful eye. The ornate gold leafing on the edges of fine china never escaped his scrutiny. The delicate curves of ceramic angels were assaulted by his gaze, and he knew every etched feather on their delicate, supple wings.

Glass was his favorite. Pure, clear glass. Its unblemished surface was always so flawless and clean, and it was always so satisfying when it broke; so satisfying to see such purity cast into ugliness.

The glass room was a place of meditation. In it, he would sit and contemplate. In it, he would stew over the conundrum of life; over the beauty and the cruelty of it all. Over the vulnerability of a human being; over the fragility of his own life and his own shattered dreams, teetering at the edge of existence just like the glass room.

In the glass room, the angels haunted him.  
They were just like humans, these little people with wings. They were like little lost soul embraced by the pending doom of the glass room, almost like little pieces of himself cowering within a sanctuary of delirium as they awaited their eventual death sentence.  
They were the most satisfying to destroy.  
Off would come their fantastic wings, sometimes engraved with rich details of individually carved feathers. He relished the cracking sound as he tore their wings from them, so alike the sound of splintering bone that his spine shivered with terror as well as pleasure as the pieces fell into his hands like snowflakes.  
And then their little bodies would sever into pieces shortly thereafter, the fine wrinkles in their gowns just so vivid and beautiful that you longed to touch them and feel the silk beneath your fingers, only they were ruined; ruined by sharp jagged edges that would cut you and bleed you with no hesitation.

Eric hated the angels.

They were so beautiful. They always seemed to be watching him and praying for him.  
There was nothing Eric hated more than pity.

Sometimes, he would retreat to the glass room every day, just looking for answers; just looking for closure.  
It calmed him to sit in his glass room. Usually, he would enter it with anger nearly collapsing the delicate caverns of his mind, and he would leave it with serenity gently plastering it back together. It was a sense of accomplishment each time to leave the glass room unbroken, knowing that at any time, he could destroy everything, and yet each time he chose not to.

And yet, the angels mocked him so.

_'Yes Eric,'_ he heard them coo. '_Break us. Break our wings one by one.'_

_'Crush us. Shatter us.'_

_'Break us.'_

Break the glass room?  
It was always an option.  
It was the reason for the glass room's existence, after all. Dreams were meant to be destroyed.  
But it was nice to linger in them, sometimes. Sometimes you could ignore how fragile something was, and forget that sooner or later, it would have to be broken.  
But was it better for someone else to break it, or was it better to break it yourself?  
Was it not better to have control over when it broke?  
Wasn't it?

Sometimes...

Sometimes Eric would be angry, and the caverns would not simply collapse; they would implode upon themselves. It would trigger an avalanche of hatred and rage and bitterness that would crush the little shred of sanity he had left.  
Sometimes, there was no cure for this anger. It would be a deep rooted, sick, dark anger festering inside him, first in his mind, and then slowly descending into the rest of him like a virulent tumor.

Sometimes there would be a reason for it this anger, however small; however seemingly insignificant. Maybe the Jew was especially cruel that day. Maybe he'd desperately wanted something and he'd had it swiped from his hands. Maybe some thoughtless person had made some careless remark.  
There were a lot of careless remarks to make; it was dreadfully easy to turn the symbiotic parasite that was his anger into an all consuming disease. There were too many to count, but broken down they all share the same, basic cores.  
Fat. Stupid.  
Crazy...  
Maybe that one hurt for a different reason.

Sometimes...  
And sometimes, there would be no reason.  
Sometimes, he just woke up in the morning already nursing darkness like a bastard child born in the night, and his mind would be the teat it suckled from, ruthlessly, until he was dry of all hope and reason.  
At the edges of reality, a crack would trail like a spiderweb spun loosely through hazy glass.  
There could be no reasoning with it. It refused all ratiocination. It declined even his most desperate pleas at clemency.  
And his glass room would be there waiting.

* * *

_And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness._

* * *

Eric sat in the glass room.  
Beside him was a baseball bat, a leftover remnant from his little league days; one of the many items he owned that still marked him for the child he still so shamefully was.  
Eyes dark with fanatic longing, dripping with agonizing loneliness, he watched the angels.

In the darkness, he breathed slow and purposely. His heartbeat drummed into his ears.  
The moonbeams broke through the window uninvited and showered his hands in cold light, not quite bright enough to reach his face. His hands were like a ghost's; they were pale and shivering, cruel and unreal.

Silence.

This was the only godsend of this miserable fucking mountain town; the singular solace he was graced with among the throes of torment.

_But the angels-_

Silence like ringing bells. Moonlight like a spray of ethereal blood on his hands. The unstable reality just barely bridging the gaps in his mind beginning to crack under the pressure of the dark's descent.

_They're fucking praying for you and you kill them they never stop-_

The baseball bat was solid and immovable in his fists; the only stable thing he had left as the pieces began to tear apart like dandelions scattering into the gusts of black cyclone. Just like the anger. Just like

_You miserable fucking fat ass don't you see them praying for you; for fuck's sake-_

like  
like the madness.

_FOR FUCK'S SAKE!_

Mind sucked dry of hope and reason by a bastard child of darkness.

Eric would scream as he swung. It would be a deep and unnatural and beastly cry; unlike his real voice still high with childhood.  
He wondered if perhaps this were actually his real voice. This rage filled cry of suffering and

_Jesus Christ stop stop you're gonna break everything gonna break-_

righteous fury.  
No.  
Not even righteous fury. There was nothing righteous about this. It was wrath. It was pitiless.  
It was vengeance.  
_It will never be enough never you can hear the angels crying can't you-_

He brought the bat down upon the angel harem first. He swung hard and mercilessly and he met no resistance save for a sweetly satisfying wail of breaking glass. He returned the bat high above his head and then brought it down upon them again, destroying as many angels as he could with each heavy handed swing. In the splinters flowing to the ground like a shower of blood, he could almost hear their screams

_You will be damned there is nothing for you here your soul is damned-_  
and so he screamed too.

Again and again he swung the bat. Every angel, annihilated. Every china plate, pulverized. Every figurine, flattened.  
Nothing was pardoned from his outrage. There was no reprieve until he had broken everything in his wake, and when he was sure that every last miserable prisoner of his umbrage had been punished, he beat them again.  
And again.

And

_It's not too late to stop you can try try to repent it's not all broken yet-_

again_._

And with every fresh swing of his instrument of judgment, Eric screamed, and even when his throat was ravaged and his bellowing cries became hoarse, he screamed, his mouth stretched open in an endless, soundless wail of anguish, and the only sound piercing the darkness was the merciless beating of broken glass.  
Even his conscience ceased trying to appeal to him.

In the darkness, there was nothing.

Minutes drifted by like moonlight on the tide.  
He was sweating profusely from the exertion, his fat face bright red, sweating pouring into his eyes and burning him like holy water. The sweat camouflaged the tears; maybe. He wasn't sure at this point if he were crying, and in the blackness, he could not be sure that they were even tears at all, or if they might be streams of blood.

Who was to say that the angels he crushed with every swing weren't people? Who was to say that the limbs he strewn upon the ground weren't the skeletons of the damned?  
The white ceramic figurines were like bones beneath his feet.

As he wound up for another swing, Eric felt the bat begin to loosen in his grip, and as he tried to bring it down, it slipped from his hands, slick with cold sweat.  
The bat clambered to the ground, and for the first time in an eternity, the only disturbance in the darkness were wretched sobs, not from some ungodly beast but from a forlorn little boy. Even as he collapsed to his hands and knees, torturing his raw throat with each afflicted cry, it took Eric a long time to break through the haze in his mind enough to realize that those tortured cries came from him, and it took even longer for him to finally, gratefully, stop.

Blinded by darkness and sweat and tears, Eric crawled away from the wreckage as best as he could, avoiding the larger pieces of glass and treading lightly in case of stray shards. If he wound up cutting himself in his pitiful escape from the massacre on the floor, he didn't feel anything.  
Not that he cared.  
Not that it mattered.

As exhausted as he was, it was too much hassle to get to his feet and get to his room. He had no strength left, and furthermore, he had no desire to do anything but sleep.  
Not because he was tired, but because he had nothing left to keep him going anymore. The rage had burnt out, and the rage had been the primary thing driving him these past few days.  
Without anger, he had nothing to hold onto, and he felt as though he were drowning in this great, black sea within his mind.  
Isn't that how it is when you drown, anyway? In the last stages before you die, you seem to simply fall asleep?  
Eric wanted to sleep.

His outstretched hand was met with the stability of a cool, white wall.  
Eric managed to touch a hot, leaking cheek to that solid, pale surface, and then he collapsed to the ground, face first. He finally began to catch his breath. The haze in his mind slowly began to fill in the cracks in the glass.  
In the absence of the mocking angels, he succumbed to a deep, heavy sleep.

* * *

_He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him, thick clouds dark with water._

* * *

Eric awoke the next morning.  
His arms were sore.  
His head ached.  
His back creaked.  
But his mind was clear.

As he pushed himself up and rolled over to lean against the wall, he dimly blinked the restless sleep from his eyes, itchy and heavy from the reckless abandoning of tears from the night before.  
When he could finally see clearly, devastation awaited him.  
The shelves and dressers that were more numerous than any room had any right to have were bare. In the meantime, the floor was a graveyard.

Eric sighed, exasperated.  
And now came the hardest part: picking up the pieces and trying to rebuild the puzzle all over again.

Eric managed to climb to his feet and painstakingly make his way to the door. His weight shifting precariously with each heavy, unsure step he took, he made his way down the hall and into the bathroom.

To something like dull surprise, the clock inside notified him that he was extremely late for school.  
Odds were his mother had heard the commotion the night before and realized that today was not a day he needed to be bothering with something trivial like school.  
If nothing else, he appreciated that from his mother. She didn't question his methods of release. She didn't try to contain his anger into something "normal."  
She let him be, and he was grateful.

He pulled off his sweat stiff clothes from the night before and showered. He even hummed a little as he ran his pudgy fingers through his hair, light and feathery and thick with suds.  
It felt good to have unburdened himself. Sure the matter was not completely done and the unpleasantness of clean up was still pending, but he felt lighter and cleaner. By the time he disposed of the last bits of evidence from his outrage the night before, he would even out.  
Maybe he still wouldn't be "right," but he would be stable again, and that was about the most he could hope for.

Eric soaked in the shower until he coaxed the last drop of hot water from its pipes, and then after hastily toweling himself dry, he shuffled to his room. He pulled on some comfortable clothes, nice stretchy pants and a large baggy t-shirt, and then bracing himself for the task ahead, he returned to what had once been the glass room.  
It was no prettier the second time he laid eyes on it, and by no means was it any easier either. He had rebuilt and destroyed and then rebuilt this room time and time again, and yet it was always a shock to see the state it was in the day after a rampage. It was scary, too, to see just the extent of the destruction he was capable of wrecking when he sank into that state.  
What was worse, he rarely remembered doing it, and again, today was no exception.  
He was pretty sure he didn't want to remember it, anyway.

Tip-toeing among the wreckage, Eric slowly began the tedious task of clearing up the shambles left after the storm. He had a stash of specialty garbage bags that wouldn't rip or tear from sharp edges, and he pulled these out by the handful. The pieces large enough he would be able to gather by hand, but he would have to be careful in the meantime not to accidentally cut himself on the smaller pieces left unaccounted for.  
It was always the smaller ones that surprised you.

He carried on for some time, piece by piece filling one black trash bag after another and wincing every time he stepped on some brittle segment left behind. Here and there he recognized the remnants of whatever the shards had once been, but mostly it was all a mess of shattered glass and broken dreams. It seemed he had been unusually thorough this time around; there was almost always at least one small thing left over that survived the chaos, but minutes drug on and garbage bags were filled with sharp white edges, and it seemed that Eric would have no memento of this past session.

That is until, hidden among the scattered remnants of his tortuously destructive rage, Eric found an angel.

He hesitated at first when he saw the little body, uncertain if it were truly still whole or else just less scarred than the others. Afraid to reach into the wreckage to retrieve it, Eric used the blunt edge of the baseball bad, and timidly pushed aside ruined, decimated remains until the figurine lay plainly in sight. It was one of the smaller ones, only a little over three inches tall; it was no surprised he missed it during his cleansing. Its tiny wings were pulled protectively inwards, as if bracing itself for the sureness of destruction it was destined to face upon discovery. Its hands were clasped in a silent prayer.

Not a crack or scratch was visible on it.

Hesitantly, Eric bent down and reached for the angel, his fingers brushing softly against the cool white ceramic face before they enclosed the tiny figure completely. With utmost care he lifted the angel to his face, unraveling his pudgy fingers to allow a more close up inspection. She was flawless. He could pinpoint not a single fault upon her porcelain frame.  
Pit against his most potent, consuming rage, this little angel had emerged unscathed when countless others had perished. And still it prayed, unassuming, unashamed.

Eric had never spared an angel before. Plates and cups, yes, but never before had an angel escaped his wrath. A measly, worthless angel.

"Are you all finished, hun?" From the hall, his mother poked her head inside the room.; the first time she had dared approach him since he had begun his most current downward spiral. Eric paid her no heed; his gaze never left the heavenly servant eternally bound to delivering its last graces to God.  
"Almost," he said back. Even though his back was turned to her, she appeared to instinctively know that he had found a survivor from among the massacre.  
"What did you find, sugarplum?" He heard her approach, but still he refused to acknowledge her. His attention was all upon the tiny little figure in his fat grasp.  
"Oh, it's a little angel," she said sweetly. "You haven't got one of those yet, do you dear?"  
"No, I guess I don't," he said. Eric slipped the angel into his front pocket. Small or not, insignificant or not, it had survived. The rules were clear.

All of the jagged pieces of glass and broken porcelain were stuffed away into disposable bags, pounds upon pounds of beauty shattered. Nothing else save the angel had made it through the storm intact.

Eric refused his mother's help in picking up the pieces, but he allowed her to vacuum up the tiny crumbs and shards too small to grasp with bare fingers.  
It made her feel better about the whole process to at least help with this, anyway; she still did not entirely understand it all.

With late morning already upon them and very nearly back to normal, Eric was starving and getting irritable about it. Liane promised that she would make him a delicious lunch, and assured him that he should lay down and get some rest in the meantime.  
If she was remotely bothered by her son having destroyed an entire room full of precious, fragile objects, she didn't say anything.

Eric stood directly upon the threshold of the glass room, staring wistfully into the emptiness. Now, it was nothing more than a room. It would take weeks, maybe months of browsing through thrift stores and pawn shops to build up his collection to the point he had had it previously.  
It was nothing new; just the same vicious cycle.

He built it up to tear it down. But, he hesitated to point out, he _did_ always build it again.

Satisfied, Eric closed the door to the glass room. He retreated to his bedroom and once there, he sought out another private collection he was slowly building up; his own private glass room, this one less an assortment of admirable, beautiful pieces and more a haven for survivors. The ones who had lasted his terrible darkness and had come out on the other side.  
It was mostly mismatched china and other dinnerware. Little ceramic pots and the like. One of them was a porcelain cat trapped in an eternally welcoming wave and another was a glass stallion indefinitely rearing towards the sky.  
And now, Eric reached into his pocket and withdrew the angel, and he placed it on the shelf with the others.  
The survivors.  
Those who had endured his darkest rage and yet still lived, untouched by his ugly scars.  
Unabashed, the angel continued to pray.

Eric didn't know what made them special.  
Eric didn't know if they _were_ special.  
All he knew was that he felt these objects sacred, as though he could somehow use them to prove to himself that as crazy as he was, and as angry as he was, and as much as he destroyed in his rage, he was not quite gone. That was why he kept them separate from all the others, safe from his fits of dark vengeance that rained destruction upon fragility such as this.  
Perhaps he had risen to the absolute pinnacle of madness, the zenith of aberration, but he had not completely fallen from grace. There was still hope for him, at least as long as these survivors were here to tell the tale.

There could still be a day when he he walked into the glass room and saw a collection of beauty, graceful and wholeness, rather than an assortment of dismembered dreams.  
There could still be a day when he could awake to darkness, and without having to resort to senseless fury, he would emerge on the other side into the light.

But sometimes, when he looked upon his glass haven, he saw them for what they were, and what he was himself: fragile, breakable objects. Frail. Disposable. Expendable.  
He knew there may come a day when his rage may overcome him, and even the survivors would break.

And Eric wondered what would become of him when he finally broke, as had so many innocent dreams before him.  
When he finally hit the breaking point, would it be the angels that shattered, or him?

The answer to that question was unknown, a vast darkness on its own, and it scared him.

But still, the angel continued to pray.

And then, he did something he had not done for a long time. Getting to his knees, assuming what would be eye level with the angel should she ever cease her endless prayer, Eric bowed his head, and he prayed.

* * *

_Lord,  
_

_With your bright and open heart, forgive me for showing darkness to the light.  
putting my back, to what is right was wrong and I have sinned against you.  
Forgive me o' merciful one, because I have realized my wrong and I am sorry for what I have done.  
Lord, I am ready to continue following in your footsteps.  
Take me from the dark.  
Hear me now, o' Lord._

_Amen._


End file.
